David Beldman clutched a plastic lawn chair and when he threw it near Constable Lynne Rusk, she aimed her gun, hesitated, then shot him.

The police officer had been sent by her superiors — alone to a remote, radio dead zone after 10 p.m.— to arrest Beldman, a starved and emaciated homeless man wanted for trespassing.

Through the dark rural night Rusk could not make out what the chair was made of, felt threatened and pulled the trigger, she told the Star in an interview.

“It was pitch black,” Rusk said.

“There was an escalation of violence. I have post traumatic stress disorder and anxiety disorder because it's still upsetting to me.”

Today's story is one in an ongoing series probing police conduct in Ontario.

A Star investigation of two decades of cases probed by the province's Special Investigations Unit found that police officers are treated far differently than civilians when accused of shooting, beating, running over and killing people.

Lee was killed after being struck by a police cruiser accelerating into an illegal right turn.

Beldman's case is an example of an incident that spun out of control due to poor preparation and planning on the part of the police force. Rusk was cleared by the province's Special Investigations Unit but no new training or planning policies were handed out as a result of the incident.

Beldman, a schizophrenic who spent his life in and out of prisons and hospitals, was on a cottage porch, separated from Rusk by at least three metres and partially obscured by a large tree when she unleashed lethal force against someone who was coming at her with a plastic chair, not a deadly weapon.

Beldman died three weeks later from complications related to the shooting. During that time he was shuttled between jails and mental institutions in Bruce County. Rusk was never charged criminally — in Ontario, an officer's size, skill and level of training help justify how they choose to handle threats.

At the coroner's inquest into the death, Rusk testified she felt the “system let her down” because her superiors never told her the radio would not work in the remote area where she was sent to find Beldman.

Rusk first made contact with Beldman after she had backed her unmarked car into the driveway of a Saugeen Shores home — a quaint green and white cottage perched atop the rocky shores of Lake Huron, and five minutes from the picturesque Port Elgin marina.

Earlier in the evening, a frightened family had called police to report they came home to find Beldman cooking dinner on their stove. Rusk then discovered, through the police database, she said, that he had a criminal record, a history of assaulting police and was “mentally unstable.”

Rusk was “scrunched” into her driver's seat watching Beldman, disheveled in his black shirt and blue jeans, tiptoe cat-like across the darkened lawn before he prowled near her car, she testified.

Beldman peeked in her open window and when he turned his attention to another house down the street, Rusk decided to confront him. The account of what happened comes from testimony at the inquest.

Rusk stepped out of her car and ordered Beldman to surrender. Instead, he backed away with his arms in the air, Rusk said, and she grew more “concerned.”

“He wasn't complying with my request ... it actually shocked me that he never complied because I hadn't, in my experience ... really dealt with someone that had never complied ... to some degree, at least,” she testified.

“I believed that he did not see me as a police officer and I felt that he saw me as a monster or something.”

“He was yelling that he was going to f---ing kill me,” she told the inquest. “I remember going through my mind that, you know, it's important for me to go home to my children.”

Beldman kept moving away and Rusk followed, aiming a can of pepper spray at his face. She fired it at him. But it had no effect, Rusk said, except to make Beldman curse, call her “Leviathan,” a sea monster from the Bible, and become argumentative. It was then, she told the inquest, she knew he was not going to “surrender peacefully.”

Rusk drew her gun. Beldman ran up the steps, grabbed the chair, threw it and “lunged toward my waist,” she claimed.

Trained to shoot at the chest, she aimed for his leg to try to spare his life, she said. The bullet struck him in the upper right thigh.

By her own account, Rusk stood frozen in place after firing her 9 mm Beretta at Beldman. This was the second time in her 22-year career that she used her gun. The first time was when she shot an injured deer.

She radioed for help as she watched Beldman, 23, flinch, bend down and run away, but wouldn't find out for several weeks that none of her communications that July 2005 night got through to dispatch.

The Star interviewed Rusk, now five years after the shooting, and read the transcripts of her testimony during the 2008 inquest. The inquest was a forum to decide what led to Beldman's death rather than evaluate her actions.

Rusk told the jury she believed using a gun was her only option because she didn't have a Taser, a device that immobilizes its target by delivering a non-life-threatening shock. In the interview with the Star Rusk said she continues to be upset by what happened. She has since left policing.

“I didn't want to kill him,” she told the Star outside her western Ontario home.

Beldman's family, in an interview, said Beldman had a long rap sheet, consisting mostly of break and enters, drug possession and trespassing, but said he had rarely been violent.

When the SIU cleared Rusk of any wrongdoing, the director at the time said she was justified in firing a bullet because any reasonable person would have done the same “in the interest of self preservation.”

Alan Young, an Osgoode Hall criminal law professor, disagrees. A private citizen in the same situation would be convicted of manslaughter — if the bullet had taken Beldman's life — he said. “It would have been ruled ‘excessive' self defence. No question about it.”

Odds are heavily against an Ontario officer being found guilty of using excessive force. Police in this province stand a less than 10 per cent chance of being convicted of it, according to Ian Scott, now the director of the SIU.

He cited this statistic in 2004, when as a prosecutor he wrote a paper that showed only 22 officers were charged for excessive force offences between 1990 and 2000. Of those, two were found guilty. Civilians, by contrast, are convicted of the equivalent charge 50 per cent of the time, Scott said.

Beldman's family, who sat through the inquest, was puzzled by Rusk's lack of skill in dealing with their relative since the officer had recently completed a two-day use-of-force refresher course. It included work on how to diffuse such situations nonviolently.

Beldman's brother Mark said that, in his opinion, Rusk went “against her training. She should not have been using a gun.”

Rusk's husband, Bill, a police sergeant and president of the Owen Sound police union, told the Star, that his wife “performed her job admirably” when confronted by Beldman's threat and was “sorry that she was forced” to respond the way she did “in order to protect herself.” He said that police officers should carry Tasers to prevent them from using deadly force.

“Although no guarantee ... my wife's incident would have ended with a different result,” he wrote in an email to the Star. The “availability of a Taser might have led to a different end result in many SIU-type investigations.”

Rusk, who resigned from the force shortly after the incident, did not learn that her bullet struck Beldman until the next morning when another officer discovered him, pale and bleeding and crouching under the front porch of a house nearby. She was happy, she told the inquest, that he lived and might be able to get help.

But the shooting deepened Beldman's paranoia of authorities, police, doctors and judges, his family said. Before he died, of complications from a blood clot, dehydration and leg trauma, he refused medical attention and any pre-opened food and water.

“My son was killed, really, for making Kraft dinner,” Beldman's mother, Debbi, said. “I don't understand how they can't find fault. I didn't know a chair was a deadly weapon.”

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